Light can be used to enhance entertainment experiences such as audio-visual media. A well-known add-on of light to video content is technology which augments the video experience for a user/viewer by controlling nearby luminaires to create lighting effects which are perceivable by the user and appear to match the video (e.g. the same color as the overall image at a point in time). These effects can be dynamics. To provide such effects, some hardware such as TVs are also being fitted with built-in luminaires.
Note that in this context, the terms “luminaire”, “light source”, “lamp” may be used interchangeably to refer to the individually controllable pieces of hardware within an environment which act as sources of illumination.
With the rise of smart home technologies, and in specific smart lighting, colored and dynamic lighting can be used to enhance home entertainment experiences in a complete environment. Light effects can be rendered throughout an entire room, immersing people into their entertainment experiences even further.
Light effects to accompany entertainment experiences are commonly specified in “light scripts”. A light script (also called a “lighting script”, or just “script”) is a data structure defining particular lighting effects to be rendered by one or more luminaires over a time period. The light script is accessed by the lighting system to “play” it alongside the entertainment experience, by interpreting it to control the luminaires of the lighting system in accordance with the effects defined in the lighting script. This is somewhat analogous to the overlay of subtitles on a movie.
Document D1 (US 2011/0109250 A1) discloses a method for lighting experience translation comprising receiving an effect based script and one or more location-effect control models where the script describes one or more light effects of the lighting experience on one or more locations in a view in an environment and a location-effect control model describes light effects being available on a location in the view in the environment. The method translates the effect based script into controls for one or more virtual lighting devices by using the location effect control model which allows to design lighting infrastructure independent effect based scripts.
Document D2 (US 2010/0318201 A1) discloses a method comprising transmitting an operate signal from a control system to a lighting device, operating the lighting device according to the operating signal, detecting an effect of the lighting device, assigning a location to said effect, and storing the location of said effect. The effects device can comprise a lighting device, and the method can be repeated